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Aloha and welcome to your Heart Magic, an illuminating space where psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, dr Beth Ann Kapansky-Wright. Author, psychologist and spiritual educator.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 0:33

Aloha everybody, welcome to your Heart Magic. This is Dr Beth Ann Kapansky-Wright, and today we are talking about the archetype of cancer and ideas on working with this archetype to help with our own path of self-discovery, to give us a few tools for our mental health toolbox and to help support our energy and our spiritual connection. So the sun will officially be moving into cancer on June 21st and it is shifting out of Gemini season, which has been activity-filled and full of ideas and movement. Gemini is the social butterfly of the zodiac and encourages us to hold space for both shadow and light. And then we move into Cancer and anchor all of that into our heart and into the home of who we are. Cancer is the crab and cancer represents emotions, intuition, our feelings, our subconscious and our psyche. Cancer is a water sign and it is linked to understanding our inner world and our emotional bodies. Cancer also is represented by the crab in the zodiac and the crab has this lovely little shell that it travels around in and there's the symbolism of home and turning our attention to home and our heart and what represents security and stability to us.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 2:09

I love working with the moon and I always feel like, since the moon is the planet connected to cancer. That it's just encouragement to continue to work with the moons and work with the ideas behind the different phases of the moon, and also to work with the moons and work with the ideas behind the different phases of the moon, and also to work with our intuition and work with our emotions and work with our psyche and our subconscious and dive into the world of feelings. So I love the sign of cancer and I want to share a teeny little poem. It truly is a teeny little poem. Want to share a teeny little poem. It truly is a teeny little poem. It's just a few lines that I wrote years ago where I was inspired by Cancer Season and it's just called Cancer Season Vibes Be kind to your soul, mother your whole, nourish your full, and your soul will be kind to the full of you. And ultimately, cancer is a very mothering, nurturing energy. It's a feminine energy.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 3:11

I often think of cancer season as connected to the cosmic mother and it invites us to think about what we might nurture in ourselves, how we might mother ourselves, how we might mother others, if, for any reason, that word is not the easiest word for you or you are actively working on healing issues related to the mother wound, then you can always swap out mother and think of the word nurture instead nurture, nurturer. You could also think of creativity and the creatrix and how you might create within yourselves, how you might be a creatrix in your outer world as well. So there's lots of ways to understand cancer and I wrote a few words down for the bright side of cancer, the light side of cancer, the gifts that it has, and then also the shadow side of cancer and what happens when it's out of balance, and then just looking at a few ideas for how we can tap into this archetype during cancer season. So, first of all, we talked about this and the archetype of the tarot series. But any archetype that we work with has both a light side and a shadow side, and when we are working with archetypes, we are trying to understand ourself through the lens of that archetype, tap into the gifts that we might have, that they might inspire within us, and also realize that nothing is all good or all bad. It's both. And we find our pathway through by finding harmony and by balancing those energies. So cancer, when we look at the positive qualities of it, the ones that some might associate as positive and they're more of the lighter and brighter sides of cancer are that it encourages us to work with our emotions, our intuition, that it encourages us to work with our emotions, our intuition, nurturing creativity, mothering heart and home.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 5:15

The shadow side of cancer can often look like carrying around emotional baggage, when we can't let go of something and we hold onto our emotions so tightly that we identify with them, and so we are carrying pains or wound. We're stuck in the wound, stuck in the pain, carrying around the weight of grief, and we feel haunted by the past and like we can't let it go. Cancer also is represented by the crab, as I mentioned, and has that shell, and so cancer is sometimes associated with being overly protective, overly fearful. Sometimes associated with being overly protective, overly fearful, wanting to stay close to home out of fear of what is outside, what happens if I let outsiders or outside energy in? And it can be very fear-based when we get like that and hang on to this overly barricaded defense system of closing off the heart in order to protect the heart. The negative qualities of cancer can also be associated with moodiness and oversensitivity and an over-attachment to the past, and we are from time to time perhaps prone to all of those things.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 6:21

So anytime we notice that we are dipping into the more challenging qualities of an archetype and the more challenging psychological aspects of ourself, it's not a reason to beat ourselves up or feel like we're doing it wrong. It's simply an invitation to look at how we might bring more balance into that area in our life. And ultimately, when we talk about cancer being a water sign and a heart-based sign and about feelings in the heart, we want to find that place of balance when we are working with our heart, where our heart is both open and open to life and open to experiences, but also rooted in something that helps us be secure, that helps us practice good nurture, that helps us pour love into ourselves and that helps us develop discernment. So, instead of feeling fearful and overly protective where we keep everything out just because it's different, we become discerning and allow what feels good to our hearts to feed our heart. We allow that to enter our heart space or at least get close enough to discern is this something good for me? Before making a snap decision, and we become discerning enough to realize when something isn't good for us and isn't feeding our heart. It's an informed decision that helps us to decide when do we be more protective and guard our hearts and have good boundaries and keep our boundaries up, and when do we allow ourselves to lay those down and open up to something new and that is very fluid. That is not something that I think needs to be rigid, but something that we can look at. There's times that we open the door and we allow more energy to come in and there's times that we shut a door and we have a reason behind that. So, just like water is very fluid and water flows and water moves, I think boundaries is something that there is some fluidity to them and I think about finding that balance between being self-protective and guarding our hearts and being discerning and also being open and loving and giving and generous. I see it as a flowing energy that we can do some assessment on and do a little bit of course correction if we realize we're dipping too far into one of those qualities and we need to pull back or we've pulled back too much and now it's time to open up and give more.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 8:53

So a few ideas on working with the cancer archetype. The first one is that cancer is an invitation to feel our feelings, to look at what our emotions are and to work with our emotions and when we are feeling our feelings. It's important to remember that feelings are information. They all have something to teach us, they all have a wisdom of their own, but they are also fluid. No feeling lasts forever. Sometimes, when feelings are really challenging, we think we're always going to feel that way or we start to overly identify with the feeling, the challenge in the feeling or perhaps the pain in the feeling. And I love the idea of remembering that feelings are fluid. If we're feeling one thing one day, we might feel something else the next, and for some people that can be very logic based. That might make feelings not feel as trustworthy. But I think that feelings actually have a lot of wisdom to offer us and that the trick to working with them is to not overly attach to any one feeling and to stay open and curious about what a feeling, what an emotion, has to teach us.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 10:11

Sometimes, if we're feeling something and we have a felt sense, an emotional sense of anger or sadness, or jealousy, or high stress or fatigue or something that feels really challenging and we can't quite name it maybe grief or something that feels in the realm of grief, anger, sadness, rage, something in the harder aspects of feelings that isn't always clear. There is good wisdom there, that this has something to teach us. It's here for a reason, but what we initially think it might mean might not always be the full wisdom of a feeling. So, for example, if we are feeling really sad about something, sometimes in the moment, the superficial sadness might be what is happening in the moment and that's the surface layer of things. But if we really sit with the feeling and ask, well, what is the sadness really about, we might find that feeling sad in the moment that we'll say something ended.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 11:14

I often will feel really sad when a TV show that I've watched, something that was a series, is over, and I'll always have that sense of identifying with the characters and feeling like, well, what next? What will I watch now? Nothing will ever be as good as this show. I sometimes will get this with the beloved book as well, and there's this sadness over an ending and on the surface level, of course, what I'm feeling is a reflection of I'm really sad that this ended, I'm going to miss it, and there's a lot of more like linear stuff in there, cause and effect, that I can see that this ended and I feel sad about that. But if I take it deeper and really sit with that for myself, I have this greater well of just sadness and sorrow over change in our lives and how everything just keeps changing.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:06

And last week on the podcast I was talking about finding perspective to work with life's transience and that idea of mano awari and working with this just gentle sadness that life changes and that this is part of the pathos of things. The sensitivity to things is what that phrase means in Japanese and just being sensitive to the transient nature of life. And part of that sensitivity for me and for many others is acknowledging some of the bittersweetness and the poignancy and the grief that's there. Sad isn't bad, it's just a reflection of my awareness that things change and they can't stay the same way forever. If they stayed the same then it would just be stagnant and we'd feel so stuck and there's no life in that, there's no growth in that. That's not what it's about.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 12:59

So oftentimes for me, feelings will hold a dual or a multifold meaning, and so when we're feeling our feelings, we work with staying curious if we don't understand them right away, or don't understand what something is coming from or we don't understand what an attachment's about, and we might journal them, we might keep processing them, we might stay open to them. I often think too, even if we don't always understand our feelings, just acknowledging them and trying to name them and claim them is so much better than resisting them and repressing them, and it often will help us move through them. And sometimes, if we are not feeling particularly insight driven, it is enough to acknowledge a feeling and then go do something, go be in nature, go do something artistically, go do a piece of writing, go do something in order to offer yourself catharsis or to help the feeling move through. So cancer is an opportunity to feel our feelings and to work with our emotional world through journaling and art and nature and contemplation and whatever else you might do that helps you stay connected to your heart and to your feelings. Something else that cancer is an invitation to do is to focus on the heart and focus on the home. Cancer invites us to come back to our home space and it's such fun energy or such anchoring energy, I should say when it comes on the heels of Gemini season, which is often about being out and about, and that's about movement, and then we change into cancer and cancer says now can you ground that into your heart and into your home? And so that could be worked with in a very linear way where you might feel drawn to make your nest cozy or do something in your home. That represents focusing on your home or focusing on your family, focusing on nurturing your loved ones. But we can also take that in a more metaphorical way and in a self-love way where we think about what represents home to me. How do I nurture my heart? What things make my heart feel like home? What things help me to feel anchored into myself? What do I need to feel more at home with my heart right now so you can play around with it a little bit. We can turn that idea inwards and really look at our inner home and our heart as our home. And what do we need to be good housekeepers of that particular home? A good example of that was just yesterday for me.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 15:41

I had a really busy week. I think I shared on here that I'm doing the choreography for a summer show, something Rotten, and it's been really fun. We just started this week. But I had a really busy week, so busy that I was going from thing to thing to thing and catching up on sleep in between and turning my attention to what do I need to do now. But I hadn't had a lot of time to journal, which is unusual for me, and I'm the kind of person that finds since I am very emotion based I find that if I don't have time to get in touch with what's going on inside of me, that I will feel really dysregulated and out of touch pretty quickly, and that's something I've learned about being an empath and a highly sensitive person and an intuitive introvert who can also look like an extrovert.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 16:32

I've learned these things about myself over time, and so yesterday I had this big, long list of things to do, but it was a Saturday and I thought to myself, before I do any of those things, I need to sit down with my journal and do one of my spiritual practices, one of my meditation practices, which is working with Oracle cards and using those as journaling prompts and working with some questions that I will often ask the cards. So for me, I might ask questions like what progress did I make on the path this week? What are the gifts in this particular life season? What perspective does spirit have for me today. What's my guidance right now, in this moment? How do I best direct my focus? Those are the kinds of questions that I might ask for those of you who have a card practice and are looking to keep using it in ways that nourish your full and nourish your heart. Those are the kinds of questions that I ask that allow me to catch up with myself, and they're really good contemplation tools and they help me synthesize my experiences and filter through the extraneous and really bring it back to the heart of the matter, and so for me, that's one of the ways that I will invest in my heart and help myself feel more at home within my heart and like I'm organizing my heart and keeping my heart a well-organized space so I know what's in it, and cancer is an invitation for all of us to do that in whatever ways calls to us.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 18:08

The last thing that I want to mention about cancer is that cancer is associated with this idea of the cosmic mother, and that means cancer is associated with the ideas of creativity and birth and origining something. Cancer is also a cardinal sign, and cardinal signs in the zodiac are signs that represent a beginning and an initiative, and again, the origin is something. So cancer season is a powerful time to give birth to something new, to plant the seeds for something new that we want to create. I will often use cancer season that for me, since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, falls around solstice cancer usually comes on the solstice or the day after. I will usually use it as a reflection point to look back at what have I birthed in this past year and what am I trying to create in my life right now.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 19:12

And sometimes I might do a big manifestation ceremony around this or something deeply symbolic to represent what I might want to manifest and what dreams and ideas and creativities I might want to give birth to. And sometimes I will just use that as a contemplation tool or a reflection to look at what I am creating and to see what this past year has brought in terms of creativity and initiating things in my life and how I might want to shift that focus or change that focus for the upcoming year. So I will sometimes look at this as a really powerful time of creation, manifestation, giving birth to something, setting our compass and our course and saying this is the direction I want to move and really harnessing that energy to hone our intention and our creativity. So I love cancer for that reason as well. Any sign that I can find creativity in and that helps me feel connected to my ability to co-create my life and to dream my life into form and to feel inspired to take action on my own behalf. With that, I'm always here for it.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright: 20:33

So, with that, happy cancer season to everyone. I hope it inspires you to feel and create and focus on whatever it is that represents heart and home to you. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I will be back next week with a new episode of your Heart Magic. Have a beautiful week and, as always, be well, be love. Be you and be magic. Love, be you.

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And be magic. You've been listening to your Heart Magic with Dr Bethann Kapansky-Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light.